June 11, 2017

Of Talaja, sunlight and photons

Talaja Morning—MC

If it mattered to me how many people read this blog, I would have stopped writing it in less than a week of having begun it. Readership is incidental to what one writes here. Response is even less relevant.

With that freedom, one writes what one feels like. Lately, that freedom has meant writing short pieces about my paintings more frequently although I do regular comment on current affairs, my main calling as a journalist.

This morning though what attracts me is this watercolor-crayon titled ‘Talaja Morning’. Talaja is a small coastal town in Gujarat where dawn and dusk produce spectacular colors. I caught the scene depicted here one summer evening two years ago. There is, of course, the sun in all its resplendent mauve, ochre, orange, rust, litharge glory. Then there are people silhouetted against it standing or sitting on the uneven terrain. What I have in mind is the figure sitting on a rock on the extreme left of the frame. I am interested in him because that could have been me.

Perhaps he has a story to tell or may be he just sitting there washed over by the fading light and energy of the star over 90 million miles away. He is thinking about how old the photons might be. In a superficial sense, they are about eight minutes old because that is the amount of time they take to reach from the sun to us.

I wrote about sunlight before and how old it might be on September 19, 2015.

“Even those who know such things and bother to think about them often mistakenly believe that the light reaching us is eight minutes old because it takes that long for sunlight to travel from there to us. The eight-minute journey is the just the final and the tiniest part of a photon’s destiny. According to NASA, which concerns itself with such things, “Most answers for the age of sunlight come out to be between 10,000 and 170,000 years.”

A photon born at the core of the sun as a result of the spectacularly violent fusion has to go through an absolutely nightmarish journey zigzagging through various layers and materials at 300,000 kilometers a second (The speed of light). It collides millions of times with charged particles in searing plasma in the process, changing its course all the time. The photons from the sun that touched me this morning could at the very least be 10,000-years-old. The knowledge that the light that reached me this morning left before there was what we now call civilization is strangely exhilarating. The sunrise that we saw this morning was in the making for thousands of years. If that does not thrill you, then I cannot help you. I am not even going into the fact that there was no sunrise in the real sense. The sun does not rise or set. We see it because of the way the earth rotates around its axis.”

That is what the man on the extreme left of the painting is thinking about.

Comments

Of Talaja, sunlight and photons

Talaja Morning—MC

If it mattered to me how many people read this blog, I would have stopped writing it in less than a week of having begun it. Readership is incidental to what one writes here. Response is even less relevant.

With that freedom, one writes what one feels like. Lately, that freedom has meant writing short pieces about my paintings more frequently although I do regular comment on current affairs, my main calling as a journalist.

This morning though what attracts me is this watercolor-crayon titled ‘Talaja Morning’. Talaja is a small coastal town in Gujarat where dawn and dusk produce spectacular colors. I caught the scene depicted here one summer evening two years ago. There is, of course, the sun in all its resplendent mauve, ochre, orange, rust, litharge glory. Then there are people silhouetted against it standing or sitting on the uneven terrain. What I have in mind is the figure sitting on a rock on the extreme left of the frame. I am interested in him because that could have been me.

Perhaps he has a story to tell or may be he just sitting there washed over by the fading light and energy of the star over 90 million miles away. He is thinking about how old the photons might be. In a superficial sense, they are about eight minutes old because that is the amount of time they take to reach from the sun to us.

I wrote about sunlight before and how old it might be on September 19, 2015.

“Even those who know such things and bother to think about them often mistakenly believe that the light reaching us is eight minutes old because it takes that long for sunlight to travel from there to us. The eight-minute journey is the just the final and the tiniest part of a photon’s destiny. According to NASA, which concerns itself with such things, “Most answers for the age of sunlight come out to be between 10,000 and 170,000 years.”

A photon born at the core of the sun as a result of the spectacularly violent fusion has to go through an absolutely nightmarish journey zigzagging through various layers and materials at 300,000 kilometers a second (The speed of light). It collides millions of times with charged particles in searing plasma in the process, changing its course all the time. The photons from the sun that touched me this morning could at the very least be 10,000-years-old. The knowledge that the light that reached me this morning left before there was what we now call civilization is strangely exhilarating. The sunrise that we saw this morning was in the making for thousands of years. If that does not thrill you, then I cannot help you. I am not even going into the fact that there was no sunrise in the real sense. The sun does not rise or set. We see it because of the way the earth rotates around its axis.”

That is what the man on the extreme left of the painting is thinking about.